The Return of the British Empire

Humbled in Atlanta, the Home Team Aims for Its Largest Medal Haul Since 1908

ENLARGE

Jessica Ennis celebrates at the British trials in June.
Reuters

By

Paul Sonne And

Jonathan Clegg

Updated July 18, 2012 6:35 p.m. ET

London

Great Britain came home from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with just one gold medal—two fewer than Kazakhstan—and a wounded national psyche. Sixteen years later, Team GB has been overhauled and rebuilt thanks to a machine-like agency flush with cash from the U.K. lottery that grooms British athletes. The result could be a record-setting performance here for the home squad.

Great Britain came home from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with just one gold medal-two fewer than Kazakhstan. But in just sixteen years, Team GB could a record-setting performance. WSJ's Jonathan Clegg reports. Photo: Reuters

Britain's quiet rise in Olympic competition over the past decade and a half—from winning a paltry 15 medals in 1996 to scoring 47 in 2008—is a textbook turnaround story. The U.K. has turbocharged its Olympic apparatus in anticipation of the London games, filling the coffers of the publicly chartered agency that grooms athletes; recruiting foreign-born competitors known as "Plastic Brits"; importing top coaches; and ruthlessly focusing the country's efforts on events where it could win medals.

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Scottish cycling superstar Chris Hoy, of Edinburgh won three gold medals in Beijing, another gold in Athens and a silver in Sydney and is Britain's most successful Olympic cyclist ever. Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

The outcome is that Britain could step out of the shadows from longtime Olympic powerhouses such as the U.S., China and Russia and make some headlines of its own. Goldman Sachs & Co. forecasts Britain will win more gold medals than Russia this summer, a potential upset that would mark a major milestone in Olympic history. The bank's analysts estimate Britain will win 65 medals overall, 38% more than it did in 2008.

"This is not about taking part. It's about winning," said Liz Nicholl, chief executive of U.K. Sport, the agency tasked with winning Olympic medals for Britain.

Nicholl predicts the U.K. will see its best performance in modern times this summer. "I have no doubt about it, actually," she said. Since persuading the government to hand over extra money in 2006, the U.K. team has enjoyed "optimal funding," she said.

It wasn't always this way for British athletes. The disastrous performance in Atlanta was devoured by the British press, which pointed to tales of hard-up athletes, including that of two U.K. divers, Bob Morgan and Tony Ally, who hawked their official Olympic gear on the streets of Atlanta for cash.

The loss to Kazakhstan merited special scorn. "A nation of goat-keepers and shepherds last night humiliated the might of Great Britain's Olympic team," the Daily Mirror tabloid wrote at the time, decrying the indignity of losing to a country "where locals use eagles to catch food."

The crisis prompted British politicians to divert money from the newly created U.K. lottery into a sports apparatus that would churn out medal-winning athletes and restore national pride.

That agency, U.K. Sport, was launched in 1997. It initially prioritized the few sports where Britain excelled—rowing, sailing, cycling and track and field—and focused on athletes within those sports who had a shot at medals.

It was a hard-nosed approach. U.K. Sport even rooted out "system blockers," or athletes who were competing internationally but had passed their prime and appeared unlikely to win Olympic medals. From then on, U.K. Sport would provide ample funding to athletes—if they had a metallic future.

"We are investing in the outcome of medal success," Nicholl says. "We are absolutely, unapologetically focused on that. So we will make the tough calls."

So intent was Britain on winning medals that it encouraged some high-performing athletes to switch into sports where they would have a better shot at making it to the Olympic podium. Rebecca Romero, for instance, won a silver medal in rowing at the 2004 Athens Olympics but was later encouraged to switch to track cycling, where she won gold in the 2008 Games.

The U.K. Olympic team started rising. It won 28 medals at the 2000 Sydney Games, 10th in the medal standings. Four years later it notched 30 medals. By 2008 in Beijing, its 47 medals ranked behind only the U.S., China and Russia.

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This year, Britain has even loftier hopes. The London Games will host the country's biggest and best-funded team ever, with 542 members. The athletes aim to fend off Germany and Australia to retain Britain's No. 4 spot in the overall medal haul. If they're lucky, they'll win more golds than Russia. "I believe it's our strongest team since 1908," said Martin Polley, a sports historian and author of the book "The British Olympics."

Britain enjoys a meaningful home-field advantage. Nations win 54% more medals when they are host countries rather than ordinary participants, according to Goldman Sachs calculations that measured Summer Olympics from 1972 to 2008.

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Perhaps the U.K.'s biggest hope is in cycling, where Chris Hoy became the first Briton in a century to win three gold medals at a single Olympics in 2008. Other British competitors with multiple past medals include Ben Ainslie, one of the best competitive sailors in history, and swimmer Rebecca Adlington, who won two golds in 2008.

Team GB is also relying on a raft of first-time medal aspirants. This is particularly so in track and field, where it recruited Charles Van Commenee, a Dutch coach controversial for his take-no-prisoners approach, to improve the team.

Jessica Ennis, the track and field star plastered on billboards across Britain, could take gold in the heptathlon, while brothers Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee could snatch Britain's first-ever medals in the triathlon.

Mo Farah, the current men's 5,000-meter world champion, has a realistic chance of ending Ethiopia's 16-year reign in the men's Olympic 10,000-meter event at the London Games. Farah, who was born in Somalia but moved to Britain at age 8, has been training in the Rift Valley in Kenya, which has started hosting an annual high-altitude training camp for British athletes thanks to newly robust funding.

To avoid the pain of underperforming in London, Britain agreed in 2006 to provide U.K. Sport with extra funding. U.K. Sport is almost done doling out £312 million (about $488 million) to teams and individuals for the London cycle (2009-2013), up from about £265 million spent for Beijing (2005-2009). U.S. teams don't enjoy a similar pot of public funding for Olympic sports and instead raise money largely from private donors.

U.K. Sport has used the extra money to support athletes as far as eight years in advance of Olympic qualification. Keri-Anne Payne, the 24-year-old British gold medal favorite in long-distance swimming, was first spotted by British coaches in South Africa at age 8.

U.K. Sport operates via a shrewd method that includes strict performance targets for the athletes, the teams and the agency itself.

The agency ranks British athletes across all sports on the basis of their chance of winning an Olympic medal, slating athletes with multiple-medal winning potential at the top. The ranking, reviewed annually, determines how much individual funding each athlete gets. The higher the ranking, the more money.

"Our no-compromise approach says we're not going to compromise and give everyone a bit," Nicholl says. "We are going to invest absolutely the right amount of money from the top down on our meritocratic list." The agency also shifts money to sports that show more promise.

Though the 2012 team may be the finest in Britain's modern Olympic history, it isn't likely to beat the country's medal tally from the 1908 London Games, when British officials drew up the program of events and included oddball sports such as motorboat racing, the tug of war and rackets, allowing Britain to scoop 146 medals. "Nobody else [besides the British] really knew the rules," Polley said.

Still, for today's British team, the biggest challenge may come after London. Almost all teams see a dip in performance after their country hosts the Olympics, but Nicholl says she aims to replicate or beat the U.K.'s 2012 medal haul four years from now in Rio de Janeiro. "That," she said, "would be a real statement to the world that this system really is working."

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